Students celebrate, learn with ‘Cat in the Hat’

Friday marked the 50th birthday of "The Cat in the Hat," and the occasion wasn't lost on students in the Lansing school district.

At Lansing Intermediate School students spent much of the day visiting one of several stations that paid homage to the Cat and other creations of Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Suess.

In one classroom, students wrote birthday wishes to the Cat.

In the cafeteria, they ate Green Eggs and Ham.

In another room, they watched as Horton Hatches an Egg.

In all, students shuttled between seven stations with Suessian themes before ending the day with a pep rally and reading of "Hooray for Diffendoofer Day" - the tale of how a school students prepares for an important test that is key to their school's future.

The story, said reading specialist Carolyn Boyd, fit in nicely with the beginning of state assessment testing at the school this week.

"If the students at Diffendoofer fail their tests, the mean principal, Mr. Lowe, will close the school and the students will all have to go to Flobbertown," Boyd explained. "And Flobbertown is a place that's pretty miserable. There, they never sing, they never dance :"

In the end, the Diffendoofer students, with the help of their teachers, learn not only what's important for the test, but they learn how to think. When the test results come in, the students' score is 1 million percent.

Boyd, who helped organize the day for the Intermediate School, said many of the stations held to themes the students would encounter on the standardized assessments: science, reading, writing, math.

"A lot of it is hands-on for the students," she said, "which means so much more to them in learning. They really internalize it and learn it better."